IS THE FIX IN? Last Friday night, in an Auckland pub, a Labour Party supporter may have inadvertently revealed how individuals within Labour’s Caucus intend to steal the leadership election. He was explaining to a table-full of lefties how the Caucus would have the final say in the election outcome. They’ll only vote, he said, after they’ve seen how the other divisions of the Electoral College have voted.
No, no, his companions objected, that’s wrong. None of the Electoral College’s divisions get to see how the others have voted. The Rank-and-File don’t know how the Affiliates or the Caucus have voted, and the Caucus has no idea who the Rank-and-File or the Affiliates have supported – or by what margin.
But the Labour supporter was adamant. Allowing the Caucus to know which way the contest was going only made sense, he argued, because it would allow the MPs to use their 40 percent share of the overall vote to best effect.
Well, yes, of course it would. With each MPs vote being worth just over 1 percent, a very close race could be decided by as few as five MPs.
The whole story worried me considerably. A quick check confirmed that Labour’s new rules make no allowance for Caucus, or anyone else, to be told how the other divisions of the Electoral College had voted before casting its own. The only people who might possibly know how the vote was progressing would be the party officials charged with overseeing the ballot: the General Secretary (Tim Barnett) and the Chief Whip (Chris Hipkins) and both of them are under a strict obligations to keep such information secret.
The reason for this is pretty obvious: any other method would allow the election to be fixed.
An election can be fixed in one of two ways: by “voting ‘em”, or, by “counting ‘em”.
Voting ‘em involves bringing in enough people to swing an election in the desired direction. These people may or may not be eligible to cast a ballot, but whoever is fixing the election has made sure that their ballots will be counted by the responsible officials.
Counting ‘em means devising some way of learning how many votes are required to put a particular candidate over the top, and then arranging for at least that number to be stuffed into the ballot box or boxes. In practical terms this involves delaying the reporting of results from one or more polling booths until the necessary “padding” of the vote can take place. One should always be very suspicious of any unusual delay in reporting the result of an election in which paper ballots are used.
There are, of course, many variations on these basic methods. Rather than add bogus voters to an election, a fixer may decide to remove his opponent’s supporters from the electoral roll. This is essentially what happened in Florida in 2000. Thousands of black voters – the Democratic Party’s most reliable supporters – turned out to vote for Al Gore, only to discover that their names had mysteriously disappeared from the voter register.
Computerised voting makes “counting ‘em” mere child’s play for any fixer with the resources to organise a successful hacking of the election management system. Once the latter’s security has been compromised, the fixer can monitor people’s voting in real time, altering the tallies as required without election officials being any the wiser.
You should now understand why the idea that Labour MPs might be able to discover how the vote was progressing, not to mention the other divisions’ final tallies, filled me with alarm. Being privy to such information would allow an unscrupulous Labour MP to organise a devastating combination of the two basic methods of election fixing.
If his or her preferred candidate was too far behind in, say, the Affiliates’ vote, it might be possible to enlist the support of several hundred nominal union members well-versed in the political arts – trade union officials, for example – and allow their votes to dilute the votes of genuine, rank-and-file union members.
And, of course, if a preview of the final voting figures from the Rank-and-File and Affiliate Divisions of the Electoral College suggested that the votes of just two or three MPs were all that was required to tip the result in the “right” direction, the opportunity to secure their support, by fair means or foul, would be extremely hard to resist.
Did the Labour supporter in the pub simply get it wrong? Quite possibly. But it’s also possible that he had overheard conversations (he is well placed to do so) describing tactics which he naively assumed to be within the rules of the game – and are anything but.
Last Saturday morning, Matt McCarten appeared on TV3’s The Nation saying: “The people who matter in the Labour Party see David [Cunliffe] as a risk.”
No one can say we weren’t warned.